Thursday, April 25, 2013

I just saw this article on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruling in favor of Chick-fil-A vs. a Vermont entrepreneur who sells merchandise with the slogan "Eat More Kale." (Chick-fil-A's slogan is "Eat mor chik'n.")

Monday, April 22, 2013

Update: Do I agree that Ebert liked only middle-of-the-road stuff? Not necessarily. Did Ebert always like Spielberg's movies? And if he did, why couldn't he and Armond White, who were mutually antagonistic, have that in common?

Movie critics don't have the role, so to speak, in the larger culture that they once did. Ebert is the last great mainstream movie critic (at least for now). I liked him, but for sheer erudition and prose style, John Simon is unparalleled. Not that I always agreed with his reviews.

Sunday, April 07, 2013

This article details the ratings trouble All In and a new CNN show have encountered. All In is opposite ratings juggernaut The O'Reilly Factor. *Should it be moved to another timeslot? Or should it be left where it is and emphasize its difference from the Factor, the way The Rachel Maddow Show, opposite Hannity, differentiates itself from that show? (see below)

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*I found out that Who's the Boss? first aired on 20 September 1984, the same day The Cosby Show premiered. For its first month, Who's the Boss? was broadcast on Thursdays opposite Family Ties (which immediately followed Cosby), and suffered in the ratings. The next month, it was moved to Tuesdays, where it stayed for several years, and the show became one of the top-rated sitcoms of the late `80s.

4 April update: I posted a comment to Proyect's blog. I subscribe to Harper's and Bookforum. Will Harper's go defunct before my sub runs out in Nov. 2015? If I didn't subscribe to either magazine, and browsed them at the newsstand, which one would I be more likely to buy? At this point I'd say Bookforum ($4.95), with its many, many book reviews and edgy writing. Harper's ($6.95) is more of a mixed bag. Its "Easy Chair" and "Anti-Economist" columns are a play for the Washington relevance The Atlantic enjoys, and its choice of Readings is more predictable than what I remember from the `90s, when I first began subscribing. Yet the March issue has a lengthy report on the cost of North Dakota's fracking boom, a review of a biography on P.G. Wodehouse and a feature on adult animation coming of age with the fX show Archer. It's this variety of writing, and a certain remove from the buzz-chasing world of opinion magazines, that are among Harper's strengths.

No one magazine can do it all. What Harper's lacks, an n+1 might have. But n+1 lacks what Harper's has. So I read the (relatively) edgy and stodgy together.

Monday, April 01, 2013

While The New York Times focuses on the momentous issue of real estate sales in the Hamptons, Russia and China will build gold-backed currencies aimed at monopolizing the trade in mineral and energy resources, leaving America and much of Europe to freeze in the dark and sit on gasoline lines at the empty filling stations. For a while that will work to the East's advantage - until it becomes clear that the entropic contraction of industrial economies is for everyone as we veer into a literal world made by hand. That's right, sooner or later Russia and China will get theirs, too. But in the meantime they have the ability to make the story a lot more interesting.

There's plenty of suspense this Easter weekend as observers nervously await the breaking action, to find out how much the oft-cited fear of confiscation has penetrated the regional money centers around Europe. Slovenia, a fairy-tale republic somewhere between Austria and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, has been nominated by observers as the place most likely to be whacked by EU treasure confiscators. It owes about 10 billion Euros to the EU entropy cloud, with exactly zero chances of meeting its obligations.

Meanwhile, at the fifth annual BRICS* summit, held in Durban, representatives from the five member nations began negotiations to establish a bank to counter the influence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

According to the MarketWatch article linked to above:

"Collectively, the five BRICS nations account for 42% of world population, 20% of output, and nearly all of current growth in the global economy."

(*BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Formerly known as BRIC until South Africa joined the bloc in 2010.)